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Demand and capacity

5. Who forecasts the demand for day care places and who provides these places?

Public child and youth welfare

The planning of demand-oriented capacities for child day care is a task of the responsible public child and youth welfare authority. In Dresden, this means the Dresden City Administration, which has in turn delegated responsibility to its municipal agency for child day care.

Executive plan

The most important planning instrument is the continuously updated »Executive plan on the promotion of children by way of child day care facilities«. The City of Dresden determines the demand for places on the basis of the requests received for day care offers. The provision of places is then recalculated at the relevant planning intervals, naturally taking into account also the available financial means and requirements for an optimum distribution of resources. Quality considerations are similarly incorporated into the planning decisions. All planning objectives regarding further development of the facilities offered are negotiated with all the parties and representatives involved in the planning process and set down in writing in the executive plan.

Parents are also able to contribute to the process through the City Parents Committee. The objective pursued by the »Child Day Care« planning group, which comprises representatives of the City Parents Committee, the municipal child day care agency, independent welfare providers, the City Building Office, the Schools Administration Office, the Urban Planning Office and the Municipal Statistics Office, is to promote greater democratic participation and public transparency in planning decisions.

The City of Dresden possesses a planning concept with definitions of the individual planning steps. It was elaborated together with the Child and Youth Welfare Committee and also passed by this committee. The concept describes:

the surveying and assessment of existing facilities,
the evaluation of public survey results, social data and forecasts, and
the determination of demand according to quantitative and qualitative criteria.

Balanced provider structure

Development of the network of welfare providers has been one of the most important tasks in child day care in Dresden over the past few years. The City of Dresden offers an increasingly diverse structure characterised by a multitude of specific educational approaches, value systems, methods and forms.

New locations are assigned by way of a public tendering process. Potential providers are asked to submit a written application to the Child Day Care Agency for Dresden. The agency assesses the offers against structural and quality criteria, and following confirmation by the City Council awards the applicable public child and youth welfare funding.

Parent surveys

Demand can only be calculated successfully, if the current requirements of the target group are known. To this end, parent surveys are organised across the city every three years. They serve to determine the actual wishes of parents with regard to topics such as flexible opening hours, the locations and capacities of facilities or providers with a particular educational orientation, and thus represent the users' view of the necessary changes to existing structures. The results of these surveys are evaluated by the municipal child day care agency, together with the other welfare providers, to permit elaboration of a correspondingly diverse and qualitatively balanced network of offers.

Further sources which contribute to a comprehensive determination of the demand for facilities are statistics on child care, demographic data provided by the Municipal Statistics Office, workshops with parents, and planning discussions with the various child and youth welfare providers.